The Painful Truth Blog

A couple weeks ago I noticed an announcement in the local weekly newspaper about an upcoming lecture that had the provocative title, God on Trial, which was scheduled for the following Sunday morning, a time when the majority of Americans would be attending services at one church or another. I was intrigued and made a note to attend.

When I arrived at the lobby of the auditorium, I found myself amongst a throng of people who were engaged in lively conversation. It turned out they were members of the sponsoring organization that calls itself the Center for Inquiry (http://www.centerforinquiry.net/ ), which I had not heard of before. Rather than try to butt into the conversations, I proceeded on into the auditorium and found myself an aisle seat with a good view of the lectern.

What followed was a thoroughly fascinating presentation by a man named Richard W. Morris, who went on at length about his experiences as a lawyer, prosecutor, professor, aviator, skeptic, and, as he eventually revealed, novelist. His lecture was largely based on his latest novel by the same title. As I told him during the Q&A session, what he had said was quite enough to convince me to buy his book.

I left with an autographed copy of God on Trial, (http://www.godontrial.ws/) which I found to be thoroughly engaging, and finished reading within a few days. Like most popular novels these days, it is filled with plenty of juicy sex, intrigue, deception and murder, but a great deal of history, philosophy, and logic besides. That’s the kind of story I like, one that is not only suspenseful and entertaining, but one that I can learn something from. The novel recounts many of the atrocities that have been perpetrated down through the ages in the name of one religion or another, particularly those of Christianity, like the “Holy Inquisition” and the various “witch trials,” and it highlights many of the discrepancies and contradictions that exist within the Bible.

The plot line centers on a blasphemy trial in which “the State must first prove the existence of God in court, using the standard Rules of Evidence.” A major sub-plot describes the corruption, debauchery and financial shenanigans that go on within a major religious organization that bears a striking resemblance to several well-know groups.

Throughout the book, David, the protagonist and the defendant in the trial, who also happens to be a Ph.D. candidate and teacher of philosophy at the local university, keeps repeating the question to his students: “What do I know, and how do I know it?” Quite a legitimate question, I think, and one that I have given much consideration over the years. In my youth I was taught that we can come to knowledge either (1) through our senses and rational processes, or (2) through “Divine revelation.”

Philosophers get into some pretty deep debates about the nature of “reality” and “consciousness,” but I won’t even try to go there. It seems quite evident that what we experience through our senses leads us to learn, to know, and to understand as we process information through our rational mind. It’s this “Divine revelation” that causes so much controversy and strife. Is it truly a way of knowing? If so, where does it come from? Is that what we call “God?”

At a practical level, I concluded long ago that most (if not ALL) religion is a racket. There has never been any shortage of people—priests, rabbis, ministers, imams, etc.—who claim to have had a Divine revelation, and/or who claim to speak for God – “Thus saith the LORD….,” etc. Some of these, no doubt, believe what they preach, but what is the foundation for their beliefs? What we “think” we know about these things is largely determined by an accident of birth. If I had been born into a Muslim or Jewish family I would have been instilled with a different set of beliefs. As it happened, it’s been my Roman Catholic indoctrination I’ve had to overcome. Having been the product of 17 years of Catholic schools, it’s something close to “miraculous” that I ever succeeded. Maybe it was my personal “Divine revelation” that did it. — Santos

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When we imagine how an accomplished teacher might look like or behave,
we draw many inferences from our Judeo-Christian belief system,
which describes God as perfect and infallible.

We conclude that a person who experiences nearness to God,is infallible.
We believe that such a person is perfect in making decisions and can do no wrong.

This myth is promoted often by the priest archetype,
the “god professional”,
in as much the following illusion is projected:
God is infallible.
I am close to God.
Thus, I am infallible,
and you need to do exactly as I say.

There is a story that deals with the theme of total surrender
as is often asked of the disciple archetype:

Gurdjieff, a spiritual teacher in India at the beginning of the 20th century,
was on a trip by car.
At one point the headlights stopped working,
Gurdjieff asked his disciple to sit on the hood of the car and hold a flashlight.
The disciple was about to climb up to do as asked when Gurdjieff stopped him, asking,
“Does it not occur to you that this is a completely idiotic request?”

The second a teaching or request is expressed that is
inappropriate or simply painfully outdated,
it should be challenged on the spot. In this way,
old traditions that simultaneously carry blessings and ignorance
are stimulated by infusions of needed reform.
Teachers who carry blessings and unreflected garbage of olden days
are given food for thought.
If these infusions are not accepted,
considered to be sacrilegious gestures,
then we should be willing to turn on our heels and walk.

- Andreas Mamet [paraphrase mine]

As I had mentioned in the previous installment my father blossomed under Keith Thomas and became a better man.  He was very clearly happy. Dad threw himself into the Phoenix Boy’s Club, Spokesman Club and there was scarcely a sabbath where we were not carrying a widow to services.   And all this dad did gladly.  Dad spoke his mind with Keith and Keith spoke his mind to dad, and dad respected him for that.

There was another family we were quite close to and that was the family of Paul Gates.   And like my family Paul and his wife Mary Alice had six kids,  David, Dan, Debbie, Donald, Dick (later he called himself Steven) and Dennis.   Don and Steve were very close to my age, and their home was just 4 blocks away from Keith Thomas home in south Scottsdale.   Paul was mortgage broker, and did a lot of refurbishing of apartments and housing, probably what some people would call today a “flipper” of properties, but Paul truly made them better properties.  South Scottsdale was then quite a nice neighborhood, although in recent years it seems to have fallen into disrepair as people prefer the Mac Mansions of North Scottsdale to the rugged little block masonry homes of the 1960s.    Scottsdale at that time probably was similar to today’s Bakersfield or Fresno than huge mega-resort and Golf complex it is now.  The biggest employer in town was Motorola, and Paul’s wife worked there, like many women did.   Motorola found that women did a better job than men did in electronic assembly.   Most of that kind of work was outsourced out to Asia in the late 1970s, but it gave families in the area two incomes where there.

Dennis Gates, the youngest child, got home from school before his mother got off work from Motorola.  Dennis had grown up, like we all had, hearing numerous sermons about fleeing to the “Place of Safety” at the “end times”.  Dennis had a real fear of it.  One day he came home and none of his family was home yet, and poor Dennis thought everyone had gone to the place of safety and left him behind.   He called my mom in a panic and mom reassured him that nobody had left for the place of safety and that his family would soon be home.    I don’t say that to mock Dennis, I remember walking home (I thought we were still at war with the Germans because my dad talked a lot about WWII) and there was a small noisy propeller plane circling above me.    I thought it was going dive bomb me, so  I started walking fast,   and when I got to my home street some marketing person had put a traffic counter with a rubber hydraulic hose across the street to count cars and I thought it was a land mine – and then I ran home as fast as I could.  Kids don’t always have all the information they need to understand what their parents are talking about.

Dan Gates is probably the most famous of the kids, Dan was a teenager when I was still a kid, and we looked up to him and his buddy Ron Lyons.  Dan drove an early Karmen Ghia coupe, with weird little stop flags that popped out of the door pillars like a school bus stop sign.  Ron had, what I think was a 65 Chevy Nova with Mag wheels, and we thought that was the coolest thing on earth.  Especially when he smoked the tires.   Dan is a charismatic sort, he went to AC and I think was ordained at one stage.  My dad always thought him a bit of a showboat, but when Dad died in 1998, it was Dan who gave the service and it was a beautiful service.    I’m sure Dad was proud of what Dan did for him.

I can’t stress how intertwined our lives became with the Thomas family, the Gates family, and others in the immediate area of Scottsdale such as the Brinkman and Cookman families.   It became less like a “fellow-shipping with the Brethren” than it did one huge extended family.

It was about this time that Pasadena decided to send Keith Thomas to another Church, I can’t remember if it was Cincinnati or The Twin Cities, I know he was in both areas.    His replacement was a fresh Ambassador College Graduate by the name of Ronald Reedy.   I doubt if Ron was even 24 years old when he was handed his own congregation.   He looked like he belonged as the lead character Sheldon in the TV Show “BIG BANG”.   He was skinny as they came, and pasty Pasadena pale.   Most of his hair was already gone, and that which was left was cropped short like a bad Army haircut.

Ron Reedy was in such a hurry to take over the Phoenix churches that he broke window to the Thomas’ house, while they were out of town, to gain entry to the home that would soon be his as part of his church supplied housing.  He couldn’t wait until they moved out. I know that for a fact because Joel Thomas told me that when I saw him years later at SEP summer camp in Orr, MN.

One of the first sermons I heard Ron Reedy give was the bold statement that “God won’t let his ministers make mistakes”.   My father, being as bold as he was, and comfortable talking to Keith Thomas as he was, walked up to him after services and said “You are wrong, David was a man after God’s own heart and he committed adultery with Bathsheeba and then covered it up with a murder”.    This INFURIATED Ron Reedy to know end that my father would challenge the truth of what he said.   In church Ron began preaching that husbands should tell their wives how to cook and do ever aspect of their lives, as if women had no intelligence whatsoever.   This point was further reinforced in Spokesman Club to which my dad replied “My wife cooks very well and I am not about to tell her how to cook”.  And if you had ever seen my dad’s cooking you’d agree.  Although he did make a pretty good camp ground pancake.  For this straightforwardness my dad’s name was very quickly put into Ron Reedy’s filling cabinet of dossiers on church members.   It wasn’t long before Paul Gates’ name joined my father in that filing cabinet along with Ed Nolan and host of other men in the area.

Everything that was good and working in Phoenix was dismantled.   Roy Sampson was “retired” from the Boy’s Club to “give him a break”, and control of that was given to Ken Lilly, and air conditioning repairman.  Ken wasn’t a bad guy but he was a hillbilly and he was proud of it.   Ken put two of his sons as leaders of the platoons.    Ken could often be found at church inner tube floats on the Salt River with his Goettl Air Conditioning truck filling up inner-tubes with R13 Freon.  Freon fills tubes very well on a hot day, the problem is when you put the tube in cold water coming out of the bottom of Saguaro lake, it shrinks very quickly and you have a half-flat tube for the rest of the trip.   The best I can say about Ken was that he didn’t seem to have any malice in him, and he did get many of us NRA certified in rifle safety.  But I didn’t stay in the Boy’s club long after he got control of it, and neither did most of my friends.  He just didn’t have the vision or class Roy Sampson had.

Among the deacons there was a divide, those like Paul and Ed Nolan and others saw things for what they were.  Others anxious to gain position and status with this new minister quickly fell into line.   Deacons were sent on errands to spy on my father, to try to trip him up in conversation to get him to say something they could throw him out of the church on.  My father and other men sensed the pogrom in progress and wisely kept a low profile.  These men were all 100% loyal to Herbert W Armstrong, but this wasn’t about doctrine, this was about blind obedience to a 24 year old ego maniac.   Gradually what emerged was sort of passive resistance to Ron Reedy’s belligerence and ineptitude.  He had his gestapo of enforcers, and God help the poor person with an actual problem that came in for counseling, he often would rehash their sins and problems before the entire congregation the following Sabbath.   This was when I decided that no matter what, I would not every reveal my innermost feelings to these kind of men.   The Catholic church at least had Priest confidentiality, but none of that existed in the Worldwide Church of God.

Ron Reedy would preach about how evil teenagers are because they didn’t have the Holy Spirit like baptized members, and as teens ourselves, all bonded closely as friends through our years of backpacking in the wilderness we decided “hey if we’re evil, we might as well enjoy it!”.

Perhaps the worst thing to come out of those years was culture of gossip that developed under Ron Reedy’s rule.  Ron wanted information for his files.  There was also a large migration of people into Phoenix from Minnesota, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, who thought this was normal behavior for the church, and even after he left, the habit of gossip remained.   The church in general had taken a hard core right turn.

The Feast of Tabernacles in Squaw Valley showed signs of this as well.  Instead of deacons helping people, they wore purple armbands emblazoned with white letters “DEACON”.  They would reserve whole rows of the best seats for themselves.  Mothers with children and elderly people had to climb into hard to reach bleachers.   I will never forget the day that Garner Ted Armstrong stopped in the middle of his sermon and said to the crowd, “YOU DEACONS TAKE OFF THOSE NAZI ARM BANDS!”   and the crowd just erupted in spontaneous clapping!    I never saw deacon arm bands ever again.

There seemed to be a war at hand between Garner Ted and Rod Meredith, Ted was the natural favorite of his father, Rod wanted to be the next Pastor General and it played itself out in many ways.  Once in a conversation in Atlanta with Rod Meredith’s son, I was told “Garner Ted had 150 affairs when he was in the WCG ministry”.   I asked my wife that evening “what kind of man keeps track of that kind of thing?”  It made me wonder.

Eventually in 1972, Church administration had changed again, and Vernon Hargrove was sent back to the area.  The first thing he did was destroy Ron Reedy’s files on the Phoenix members.  The booklet 1975 in Prophecy was already dated and the time lines no longer worked as 1972 was a pivotal date in the book.  Garner Ted Armstrong’s sexual indiscretions were starting to be public knowledge as word of it leaked to Time Magazine and other publications.

My father kept attending the WCG, dad repeated a line he heard from Gerald Waterhouse likening Garner Ted to Joshua and his “dirty garments” and thought after a period of self-reflection Garnet Ted would restored to the ministry and Television.  Those that suffered through the abusive authoritarian tactics of Ronald Reedy felt that Garner Ted was a voice of reason when it came to the lives of the members.

Paul Gates and Ed Nolan left sometime after Vernon Hargrove came, perhaps as early as 1973 or when Garner Ted was tossed out the first time which was around 1974 or 75.   They never returned but dad kept his friendship with them.  I think they just wisely saw the church for what it really was.   Steve and Don went the same high school I did.    Later on I drifted away from them, stupidly following the church edict not to associate with those that left.   In 1997 I was reunited with some of the old gang.  I apologized to Don Gates about treating them as they were pariahs after they left the church.  Don just smiled and gave me a hug and said “hey we all knew you wake up sooner or later about that church!”   Not retribution, no hurt feelings, just the simple grace of friends reunited.

PS: in case you’re wondering, I am the kid in the photo on the far left.

— Next Installment Joseph Tkach Jr comes to Phoenix —  NOTE: This might not appear until later in September.

The Keith Thomas Era of the Phoenix Church

I went to Tonalea Elementary in the Scottsdale Public School system. The school at that time was a very open school from the point of entry and exit. It had entrances to the grounds from four sides, and as most homes in Scottsdale at that time had alleys for garbage collection, two of the entrances were from the east and south side alleys as kids came from all directions to attend the school.

I can’t say there weren’t child predators back then, there must have been as we were regularly warned not to get into cars with strangers and I even remember seeing one cheesy low budget 16 mm film about nefarious men enticing children into 1950s cars at a very early age. The 1960s were a break from the 1950s, and a huge break in architecture and automobile design from the 1950s. I remember thinking that nobody drove cars that looked like those men in that movie. I don’t recall any stories circulating about any abducted children, and if there were, our parents didn’t tell us about.

All kids either walked or rode their bikes to school. My walk was about a mile and a half. The City of Scottsdale didn’t provide buses but neither did it segregate kids. We had two black kids, some Mexican-Americans, and a few Chinese. The only kids that got bus rides were the kids we so politically incorrectly called “the retards”.

Unlike modern schools, Tonalea was free of bars, and the north side of each class room was from about 4 feet on up, glass panes, the top of which could be opened to fresh air with a long pole during cooler months of spring and fall and winter. Our school was centrally air conditioned by an old style water chilling system for those times of year that it was hot.

The Principal was Walter E Bright. Walter wore a gray suite and a flat top haircut of salt and pepper gray hair. Walter would spank you if you ever got out of line, and parents at that time gave schools free reign to do that to unruly children. It didn’t happen a lot, but there is always those few boys who have take on the system to see if it means what it says.

I remember being ill in first grade, and being taken to the nurses office. This particular visit the nurse disappeared out of the patient room for an usually long period of time. When she came back she was in tears. She cried “President Kennedy has been shot!” in a painful release of emotion that I will never forget. The woman who could vaccinate 400 children without a flinch, could barely function. I remember being stunned as to what this meant. Why would anyone shoot the President? This was America! The America my dad risked his life for in an P-38 over Germany. As a child you sometimes take your cue to events by the reaction of the adults around you. It was the only time I ever saw the stoic nurse and school administration staff in complete tears. It was very clear to me something horrific and historic had happened. What I did not know then was that nearly 50 years later I still would not know why Kennedy had been shot. Each year that has passed has only raised more questions.

The old saying is everyone remembered where they were when Kennedy was shot. I do. I suppose today’s generation will say that about the Twin Towers, and their answers as to why are even less clear than the Kennedy tragedy.

I had argued with my father during the Kennedy/Nixon TV debates that Kennedy would be President. I quite liked Kennedy, but my dad being a Republican was not too happy to have his son rooting for Kennedy. I don’t know why I thought Kennedy would win, perhaps it was the awful way that Nixon looked under the Klieg lights, all sweaty and swarthy. I knew nothing of his politics or reputation. But I argued with dad a lot. I used to think Jeeps flew, and my dad thought that was quite funny, and when the TV commercial showed the Jeep jumping a hill, I said “SEE DAD!”

When President Kennedy announced we were sending men to the moon, my father was quite excited. I remember him taking me out side and pointing up to a bright full moon and saying “men are going there Bill!” It was an exciting time! Hope was in the air. America had never been so wealthy in the middle class. Airlines were going from propellers to jets! Some cars had wings and shapes like jets. And really sexy expensive Cadillacs had chrome tits with rubber nipples. Anne Margret was dancing with Elvis and Bridget Bardot was causing boys to go into early puberty.

Something happened to America when Kennedy was shot. It did something to the soul of the nation. Perhaps it was policies that were so quickly reversed, perhaps it was the unanswered questions, but we lost some sort of innocence as a country then. We internalized it as there was something wrong with we the people. What we should have been thinking was that there was a cancer in our government that got a foothold during the great war. That our country had seen a coups-de-tat of power. But we were far too innocent to comprehend what the next 40 years would bring us and the unimaginable slaughter and waste of Vietnam. Who in 1963 would think America would send its middle class jobs to China and India?

The civil rights movement was coming into full roar, and I know that made my dad feel uneasy. Dad had memories of the KKK and Knights of Columbus nearly starting a range war in 1930s Montana. The KKK didn’t just hate blacks, they hated Jews and Catholics too. I have Catholic cousins in Montana. The KKK paraded by the hundreds through the streets of Montana towns during the 1930s, as did Nazis and Communists in industrial belt cities of America at that time. I think it was not so much the issue of blacks protesting that bothered dad as it did to stir up memories of American depression era unrest that led up to the start of WWII. Dad had had enough war. It was in this environment we entered the Worldwide Church of God.

Keith Thomas’ arrival was not a hugely announced event. He had been a local elder, I believe in the El Monte church in Los Angeles prior. Keith was a WWII veteran like my father, a Navy submariner in the Pacific War. And like all men in WWII subs, he was short. My father was not exactly tall either, probably 5’8”. What Keith lacked in height he made up in energy and enthusiasm. Keith and his wife Avis had two daughters, Carol and Beverly, and two sons Dennis and Joel. Their new home was in Scottsdale about 4 miles from my own home. Joel and Dennis attended a different elementary school than I did, Supai. Most schools in Scottsdale were named after Indian tribes or villages.

Keith loved playing volleyball, and soon had a Phoenix church league playing volleyball on Sunday mornings at Encanto park. My dad hit it off well with Keith Thomas, although dad wasn’t much of a volleyball player. Dad seemed to flourish during the time Keith was in our area. The two men had much in common with military service, and Keith understood my dad as only another warrior would.

Dad threw himself into spokesman club and shared that club experience with Hilmar Lange, Ellis LaRavia, John Amos, Paul Gates, Roy Sampson and others. Ellis LaRavia ran the Shamrock Rose Farm in West Phoenix and often allowed church teenagers to fund raise by packagign bare root roses. LaRavia later became an administrator in Pasadena after being brought in to work with the grounds in Pasadena. John Amos – a radio presenter on KOY radio, and almost always the song leader, was, prior to his death, one of Gerald Flurry’s inner circle. John died of a freak sinus infection I believe. Hilmar Lange was a tool and die maker that built a quite substantial business in precision aerospace parts.

Every Pentecost the Phoenix church would have a guest speaker from Pasadena. This was usually either David Jon Hill, or Al Carozzo. David Jon Hill was quite a writer and a pretty witty speaker. I don’t think I was ever so scared of sermons as I was during Al Carozo’s sermons. It seemed he always spoke of the end times and what would happen to this country and how a revived Nazi empire would march Americans into showers and then make us march out into the snow to freeze to death. We’d have to make our own bullets and then be shot with them.

It was all pretty grim and grisly. It certainly was to us kids.

The adults could take some solace in the beer and wine that would be available during the Holy Day potlucks. In the 1960s alcohol flowed quite freely and there was always a keg of beer. This was not unique to Arizona, people in Pasadena were known to drink quite heavily. This was especially true at the time the church in Phoenix was at the Phoenix Woman’s club. The seclusion of the Woman’s club made it a good place to share booze with the flock and I don’t think anyone in Arizona would have said anything anyway, the way we were dressed people would have thought it was a wedding anyway. My father drank alcohol, as did most post-prohibition adults. I do not recall ever seeing my dad drunk. I don’t recall any members being drunk at services, although many certainly dozed off. It wasn’t something I paid a whole lot of attention to because I didn’t really like the tasted of booze, and I had tasted my dad’s beer and wine and found it harsh to my kid palate.

Dad’s policy with alcohol with us kids was that we could have a little bit in a tiny glass (probably 3oz) if we wanted it, but we had to drink it at dinner with the family. Dad’s view was to teach us to view alcohol as food rather than a rite of passage and something to get high on. The Montana my dad grew up in you only had to be tall enough to look over the saloon bar to drink – so perhaps he felt he was giving me a more strict upbringing than his own. I don’t carry on that policy with my daughter, especially with the way the alcohol laws are in California with minors – its just not worth it. For the most part that seems to have been a fairly wise approach. I know from the time I lived in France, French kids drink wine with their families. You don’t tend to see a lot of drunk French teenagers and young adults. It’s a cultural thing. The forbidden fruit taste sweetest.

There was a man who did a tremendous amount of good in Phoenix and he remains largely unsung. Roy Sampson was a big horn sheep guide and mountaineer and took people hunting in the remote wilderness areas of Arizona. Roy was/and is an extremely successful entrepreneur. He was probably the wealthiest man in the Phoenix church. He, my dad, Keith Thomas, Ed Nolan and Loren Chamberlain started a program in the Phoenix church for us boys. From some strange reason we had about 3 times as many boys in the church as girls and we were all very close in age.

Roy came up with the idea to form something called “The Phoenix Boys Club” which was modeled closely on the Boy Scouts. We couldn’t be a part of the Boy Scouts because of the church’s prohibition on “pagan symbols” and the Boy Scouts of America uses the fleur de lis in its apparel. So Roy formed this quasi “Boy Scouts/Boys Club” organization where there was a system of merit badges and we would use the boy scout uniforms as our clothing except we did not wear the yellow scarf because of the fleur de lis issue. The club consisted of 10 ten mile hikes, followed up by one 20 mile hikes. There were also a number of five mile hikes.

Keith Thomas brilliance was that although he was “in charge” of the Phoenix church, he let Roy run the Boys Club. He didn’t have to take credit for it. Keith knew how to delegate and how to get out of the way. Keith often came along on the hikes, as did my dad, but he let Roy set the direction and the goals and choose the venues of the hikes.

Our first meeting was mostly a drill sergeant boot camp learning how to line up like soldiers and turn as a group and we really hated it as it was one of those 110 degree days in the sun. Initially, as we did our maneuvers we had all the cohesiveness of 30 ferial cats. It wasn’t until we got a few hikes under our belt we learned the reason why we went through that. If we got separated in the desert and disorganized kids would die. Roy organized 3 platoons of 8-10 kids each led by 3 older kids, his son Roy Jr, Roger Chamberlain, and Dennis Thomas – Keith’s son.

I was in Dennis Thomas’ platoon. We were organized by height, I was third to the last, next to my brother Brian and Joel Thomas. Joel and I became good friends, short boys stick together for safety in numbers. It was Joel who taught me to swim at age 9. My mom had sent me to swim lessons at a lady who taught kids in her home pool, but I was so skinny as a kid you could see my ribs, I had zero body fat. And after an hour or so of swim lessons I’d turn purple with hypothermia. Plus I was scared of the drain. I saw cartoons where the cartoon character pulls the plug on the drain in the pool and it drains like a bath tube and I was deathly afraid at age 5 of that happening to me. Joel once confided in me that when he grew up he was going to marry a tall woman – and that’s exactly what he did!

One of our first hikes was to the Superstition Mountains east of Phoenix near Apache Junction. These are the mountains (cliffs really) of the famous Lost Dutchman Goldmine. They are very imposing geological formations rising vertically thousands of feet from the desert floor. There has long been a history of very strange happenings in that area – its considered Apache holy land. Stories of beheaded bodies, ghosts and strange things have long been associated with the area.

I don’t think there’s anywhere on earth that has more rattle snakes per square mile than the area around Apache Junction. It’s a very strange but beautiful area – probably the only rock formations I have seen like it are some pictures I have seen of the Australian outback. Incredible rocky and rugged terrain accessible only by foot or donkey.

On one of our early hikes we had camped out at the base of the cliffs and got ready for a long hike the next day. About 11pm or so we started hearing the strangest wails and music we ever heard. Some of the men walked up to the cliffs about 500 feet away from camp and came back shaken. Sound carries a long ways in the desert night air and the cliffs reflect sound well. I think what we heard was probably a native American ceremony in progress, miles away, probably Apache. Some of the men thought it was something supernatural – WCG people saw demons lurking everywhere. The vocabulary of many Christians for unexplained phenomena is not very broad. When you’re sitting around a spooky campfire casting long shadows in a moonless desert night its not hard to imagine such things in any case. So we dove into our sleeping bags where nobody could touch us.

On one hike in the Superstition Mountains we were heading for a canyon called La Barge Canyon. La Barge Canyon will take the hiker directly into Canyon lake. It looks like many other box canyons on the ground, not easy to find We had hiked 6 miles and though trained in how to preserve our canteen water, by sucking on a round pebble when thirsty (old Indian trick), we needed to find the water of La Barge Canyon fast or we would be in big trouble in the Arizona heat. Water is a matter of life and death in the desert.

We knew we were close, and gone back and forth a couple of times – one of the few times I had seen Roy get lost on a topographical map and compass. But I think the mountains themselves can play games with magnetic compasses – there’s a lot of minerals in that area. There was a later hike in those mountains that I missed due to illness where they did get lost for a day.

The men we were with stopped and we set down our backpacks and the men hashed out what to do next.

I had sat near my dad when a man in who appeared in his late 20s or early 30s arrived. He wore a red and white checkered cowboy shirt with pearl snap buttons, Levis, cowboy boots (which are made to resist snakes) but no cowboy hat. Arizonan’s didn’t typically wear a cowboy hat – unless you were a cop. In short this man was what we’d expect to see at that time period and place.

The man asked us where we were heading, the men told him Labarge Canyon. He said “I’m going there myself – follow me. So he walks around the corner of this house size boulder and we pick up our packs and follow him. As we get around the corner of the boulder there is a trail that rises about at a 30 degree angle and you can see the trail a good ¼ mile ahead. The man vanished! To our right was the side of box canyon, to the left was a 100 foot drop to a dry creek bed. The men were shocked, and I remember dad saying I think we just got directions from a guardian angel. It’s the only time in my life I have ever witnessed a human being vanish but there was nobody ahead of us on that trail – and it was the right trail. And if it wasn’t an angel it was one incredibly fast human being.

Within about 20 minutes we found water and were soon swimming in pools of water. A couple of hours later we emerged at Canyon lake and met up with the adults waiting with the vehicles for us.

Roy took us on a good number of hikes in the 5 years that followed, Aravaipa Canyon in Southern Arizona, The San Francisco Peaks of Flagstaff and Monument Valley and the cliff dwellings of the Four Corners area. It bonded a group of kids in a way no other experience ever could have done. My friends Tim, Bernie, Steve, Don, Joel, Tom, my brother Brian and others learned how to survive in the desert, how to stalk deer, how to disappear without leaving a trail. Most of all we became life-long friends.

Roy insisted on us leaving a camp site cleaner than we found it. If there was existing trash in a camp site, we picked it up and packed it out. Roy was very environmentally conscious in a time people were quite happy throwing beer bottles and cigarette butts out of windows of cars. But Roy could not have pulled it off without the full support of Keith Thomas. He was a friend to my father. Dad trusted him deeply. Joel was my friend. Carol was my sister’s friend, and although it was Hebert Armstrong’s doctrines were taught, it was one of the happier times of my life.

— Next Installment – The Meredith Storm Troopers —

My first visit to the Phoenix Worldwide Church of God was in February 1963 I believe. The Phoenix church was founded by David Jon Hill, and Vernon Hargrove was the first full time pastor in the area.

I remember dad and mom getting all of us kids together into the station wagon. Our only bible was this huge family bible that didn’t get a lot of use. You could always tell the new people in the Radio Church of God, they didn’t yet own large margin bibles and the thought of writing notes in the Bible was sacrilege.

We arrived at this older part of Phoenix, I’m guessing it was south of McDowell Road near 7th Street but I can’t place it from memory. It looked like it had been built in the 1920 or 1930s. The buildings were large Spanish colonial style, terracotta tile roofs, very high ceilings for air flow, and had a very rough stucco exterior painted white.

The hall we met in was owned by the Odd Fellows, and I remember crossing the threshold of that hallway leading into the building and above the lintel was three chains with an eyeball in the center. I don’t know the history of the Odd Fellows but it had a certain Masonic/Illuminati feel to the hall. The eyeball scared me. But then at that age I was afraid of clowns too.

The building itself was intersected by a cross shaped hallway, if you walked straight in you would climb a ramp (stairway? I can’t remember) and enter a small auditorium with a stage and curtains. That was not where we met. The hall we met was off the the left on the hallway, sort of the left arm of the cross shaped hallway if you will and there was a pair heavy oak doors.

As we entered the room the hall was arranged very much like a Masonic Hall including the “G” above the head Chair. There was also a row of chairs around all four walls that surrounded the general seating area. Again very much like the Masonic Halls. The Worldwide Church of God rented a lot of Masonic Halls for services over the years. I don’t know know the reason for that, perhaps it was price.  The only Masonic connection I recall is a rumor about Stanley Rader being at 32nd Degree Mason, but I never saw any proof of that.  Herbert W Armstrong was a Rotarian as were some of the faculty of Ambassador.

There was a podium in the front and everyone sat in the main seating area and did their best to ignore the rest of the hall. The members stared at us because we were clearly new.

When the service began, we sang three songs, and then the song leader introduced the “sermonette”. And a man gave a talk lasting about 15 minutes. Then we sang another song and I thought was time to go home. Nope! This time Vernon Hargrove spoke, and to be honest we was a pretty good speaker and personable. But my little kids butt had difficulty sitting still for 90 minutes of sermon! I wanted to crawl on the floor, make faces at the kid behind me, run out side, anything but continue to sit and listen to this man talk for 90 minutes. I asked dad if we had to go back again, this time he said YES YOU DO!

We were invited over to various people’s houses over the ensuing months, I think the first family was the Metz family, Ed Metz was some kind of engineer for AT&T and had some conspiracy theories that out conspired anything my dad ever told. One thing that sticks out in my mind about those conversations during our “fellow-shipping with the Brethren” was the Ed Metz’ preoccupation with an obscure Catholic group called the Blue Army. One thing you quickly learned was that the Radio Church of God (later Worldwide Church of God) feared Roman Catholicism. Mr Metz spoke frequently of this Blue Army and its nefarious dealings.  I have never heard that group mentioned anywhere else or since in any other conspiracy theory. I don’t know where he came up with it. But they were a very nice family to us and treated us very kindly. They also had a son near my age named Willy. Willy was a crack up. Dad also befriended the Scutter family. Mr Scutter was an aircraft mechanic. There was also the Morgan family, a very old Phoenix family, Bill Morgan was probably one of the original deacons in the area.

It hadn’t been all that many years since the land became a state (1912) and the Apache wars, Spanish American War and Pancho Villa’s bandits were still in the collective memory.   Some my dad knew had personal memories of the recent of those events. The Spanish never got a whole lot farther than Tuscon.   Arizona was supposed to have had a seaport in the Sea of Cortez, but the surveyor its is said, was bribed to change the angle at the bottom of the state so that Baja remained conjoined with the rest of Mexico.

Arizona, contrary to popular recent belief, was not an a bastion of racial bigotry. There was Hispanics in Arizona but they were all citizens of the USA.  It was rare at that time to find “wet backs” as they were called then. Those that dodged the laws to work illegally.  And in the 50s as 60s there were temporary work permits for farm laborers.  Because of the warm climate Arizona farmers grew crops year round. Citrus, cotton, cantaloupe, iceberg lettuce and sugar beets were all big crops.  It wasn’t until there was wide spread use of air conditioning that there was any substantial population in the deserts of Arizona.

There wasn’t many blacks in Arizona.  When I was all of five years old I met the first black man I ever saw. He was an old man, and dark as coal. His skin was almost bluish-black from working in the sun. He was a junk collector, and he visited my father’s autobody shop every few months and would pick up wrecked chromed bumpers and aluminum grills that dad took off wrecked cars, and he collect the broken lead batteries. While my father told ethnic jokes, and used the “N” word, he saved this metal for this man so he could make a living. Later my father told me about the scripture in the Old Testament about not gleaning the corners of your wheat fields, that should be left to the homeless and widows to collect for food. Dad said that scrap metal was the corners of his field (his business) and as long as that man was willing to work for a living he was going to continue giving the metal to him for free. That was the example my father left me about a man of a different race, if he’s willing to work – help him.

Old Man Scotty, who ran the blacksmith shop in front of my father’s autobody shop, was a true bigot.  He hated Jews, Catholics, Blacks (I’m not using his term and do a Dr Laura).  But he was good to my dad and rented him his work place. As a kid the old guy was an old man to me.  But he banged hammers on forges and fixed farm implements as well as a young man.   He had however a coffee pot, that my dad would never drink coffee from.  It was one of those large percolator pots that you might find in a restaurant.  My dad said he never saw Old man Scot change the coffee out.  He simply added new ground each day and more water.  Dad believed it be one toxic brew.

His son Ken, smoked a pipe and had many of his dads racial beliefs, especially about blacks.   The really strange thing was the disease Ken Scott died from – sickle cell anemia.   I always thought that so strange from a man how hated blacks, he had a black man’s disease he couldn’t tell people about.  But I would not wish that fate on anyone, bigoted or not.  Dad said it was the nasty coffee pot that did it to him.  Even my father didn’t face the facts of Ken Scott’s genetics.

When the Days of Unleavened Bread arrived the entire church of about 80 people had a pot luck dinner on the grounds. What was really strange to me was that the black people were segregated to a separate area and were not allowed to eat with the white people. Vernon Hargrove was from Mississippi, but I don’t think that was the reason for it, I think it was official church policy to segregate blacks when it came to meals. I found this very strange – and it made me think maybe something was wrong with black people, otherwise why didn’t they eat with us? But it seemed to make sense to the adults.   If you read the early Plain Truth magazine it is quite clear that Herbert Armstrong viewed the civil rights movement as subversion of the God given order of the races.   When civil rights laws were enacted the church officially declared blacks equal, but even when I was at Ambassador College in 1982 black students could not date white students.   And from the computer records I had access to of the church offices around the world as a student employee, the South African office kept very detailed stats on the racial make up of each church in South Africa.  And we thought that bizarre in data processing, but the South African office insisted in was necessary.   You could always be sure that if there is a major revolution civil rights the church will be the last to advance the cause.  Racism is endemic in Armstrongism, and British Israelism helps sustain it.

When the time came for the Feast of Tabernacles we only had a  little over a years “2nd tithe” saved up for the occasion since we started attending in February or so.   Dad was told he must go so he decided we would camp out at the Feast, which was not that big of a deal because we did a lot of camping anyway and had some cook stoves and sleeping bags.   Mom got busy finding clothing for the cold weather of Lake Tahoe as we had only clothing for the Arizona heat.   Every church at that time had a “used clothing department”, members didn’t make all that much money to begin with and after paying 10% to the church in “1st tithe” and saving “2nd tithe” not a lot was left for winter clothing.   Instead of buying Brian and me long johns for Camping in Lake Tahoe, mom got the bright idea to put us in women’s tights that she had scrounged up in the “used clothing department”.   So one cold morning in Lake Tahoe mom springs the tights on us, and I didn’t want to wear them.  I was like a cat over a bathtub of water scrambing to keep my legs out of those things.  Mom persisted and told us nobody would know and if we didn’t shut dad would spank us.  We didn’t screw around with dad so we surrendered.  During the service we are sitting in the stands directly facing the speaker below the ice skating score keeper boxes.  My innocent 5 year old brother says to our new friends “see my red tights!”  And he pulls up his pant leg.  All of our friends start making fun of us.  Then he tells them that I have on black ones!  I was never so embarassed in all my life!  What a thing to do to a kid!   All I could do is shrink down in my stadium chair and pretend I wasn’t there.  I refused from then on to wear them ever again and my mom never pushed the issue.

My sister Bobbe had graduated from Northern Arizona University and she met her husband Don who was a color press printer for Ambassador Press.  Before long they married and Bobbe moved to Pasadena.  You can see Don’s labor in the 1969 Envoy.

In a few years the church grew enough to where we were renting the Phoenix Women’s Club not far from Central Avenue. The Phoenix Women’s Club was very nice hall surrounded by walls and a court yard and had a large collection of roses outside. Keith Thomas was our new pastor and Vernon was moved to another area.

— Next Installment – The Keith Thomas Era —

My mother had quite a full household when I was born, there were already 3 daughters in the house and only one bathroom for which to preen themselves. Using the bathroom meant you had to be quick, and with so many growing kids at the dinner table the same rules applied.   Air conditioning was not yet pervasive in Scottsdale, in fact it was quite expensive.   No cars came with it.   Most people in our neighborhood had evaporative cooling which works well in the desert until summer monsoon season kicks in mid July and the humidity gets high.   Evaporative coolers are essentially a box with four sides containing vents and panels of shredded aspen wood upon which drips water.  Inside is a large squirrel cage fan that sucks in hot dry air, cools it though the pads and then is blown into the house.  Its a drafty kind of cooling, but in dry weather it can take the house down to the low 80s.  The fresh aspen shavings have a nice clean scent to them.

Mom always took at a nap of an hour or so in the hot afternoons.   Its hard to do much else when it is a 110 degrees in Scottsdale.  Just living in Arizona took a certain kind of hardy people.  I think people living in the deserts of Australia would certainly understand.   Mom would put me and my brother down in our beds and make us take a nap each afternoon.   I’d often stare out my window at the mulberry trees and wonder why I saw the leaves in a double image – and I had 20/15 vision – so it was not a matter of needing glasses or crossed eyes.    It wasn’t until 2002 that I took a massage therapy course that I learned what I was seeing in plants in my youth were the plant energy auras.    I was seeing auras until I “learned” from everyone else plants didn’t have double images, and then I saw no more auras.  That is simply how the brain works, its a huge filter based on what you believe is possible.

Since my NDE I have seen auras around some people, I don’t see them in color as some people do, it looks more to me like heat rising off hot pavement – kind of clear, and sometimes I see auras in pine trees.  But not often.   The largest aura I ever saw was during a visit to a local Buddhist Temple and  during a recent lecture on natural healing at  a local alternative health school.

My sisters Bobbe and Joyce were far too close in age, and fought about clothes and boyfriends. They both worked as teenagers at Bob’s Big Boy on Thomas Ave and Central Ave in downtown Phoenix and took buses to work each day for their shifts in the summer months. They were roller skating car-hops in the hottest drive-up burger and shake place in town. If you saw the movie American Graffiti, you kind of know the sort of restaurant. Hot rods, teenagers, and fast food. Joyce had a weakness for Big Boy onion rings.   During the time my sisters were working teenagers would often drive along the many canals which lace Phoenix from the Salt River Project, attach a water ski rope to the back of the car, and ski down the canals.   By the early 70s that became illegal and would land you in jail.

Sherry was displaced as the baby of the family upon my arrival, which meant she delighted in teasing me – mostly putting me on her lap and then taking my wee hands and lightly slapping my face with my own hands and saying “why are you hitting yourself”. As I kid I found this infuriating, but there wasn’t much I could do about as I was 6 years smaller.  But I got revenge when she was a teenager by hiding under her sewing table after we came home from Wednesday night Bible Study and yelling Boo!  I could never figure out why she fell for that each week.  But it delighted me no end.

I wasn’t alone as a little boy,  I had my long suffering brother Brian, who was 2 years younger and a slew of neighborhood boys in the immediate area. We must have ten kids within a few houses.  Mom was then pregnant with Benny.

In 1962 they sold little toy rifles with plastic bullets with springs that fired from shells  like real bullets. They certainly loaded like real bullets. I got one for Christmas. They’d never make it to market in today’s nanny state America. I’d don’t pretend to know how many eye injuries kids got from those things.  They didn’t shoot very far but they did sting if you got hit.  Brian got a bow and arrow, the kind where the arrows had suction cups and you could shoot mom’s fridge and they’d stick. Brian discovered the suction cups came off easily and actually managed to shoot a pigeon down from the Mulberry trees in our front yard.  The bird was stunned but soon flew away. We thought that was way cool.

We would spend our days like all little boys did, playing Army and hide-n-seek.  One of our “toys” was to take used D cell batteries and pretend they were hand grenades.  Dad’s dichondra grass plug cutter made great “land mine” holes which we dropped D cells in for our 6 year old enemies.  Dad would, in later years,  wonder why his roto-tiller would occasionally find batteries.   Dad also found his garden carrots had grown through radio vacuum tubes.  We used those as space ships in our old sand box.  They kind of looked like the space ships in the Dick Tracy cartoon strips.

Dad had built this lean-to out of 2X4s and 2x12s next to the fence in the back our backyard and covered them with old palm tree fronds.   It gave us shade to play in the sand, and we’d flood out our little trucks and canals with excess water from the evaporative cooler.   By the end of the day it’d be a complete mud-bog, but we stayed cool and had great fun, and mom would just stand us up in the back yard and hose us down with a hose before letting us come into the house and shower.   Some of the really lucky kids a few streets up had irrigation rights (which was optional to the home owners since the land was once a cotton field)  and their yards would flood.  We’d cut thin pieces of plywood and go skim-boarding across their flooded lawns.

When not getting filthy muddy in Arizona sand and adobe clay, one of the games we used to play with each other was the finger game.  One kid closes his eyes and the other one points at the center of the others forehead.   When you get within a few inches of the person’s forehead it drives them crazy because you can feel something is there without seeing it.   We called this “radar”.  We found it worked from the back and the sides too, but not as well as from the front.   We had fun with it and never thought twice about it.  It was natural, and fun.   We were playing with the human energy body – the energetic “chi” of oriental medicine the body within and without the physical body.   The body of the acupuncture meridians (you didn’t think those lines correspond to organs or nerves directly did you? – they don’t).  Its the energy body of the chakra vortexes that massage therapists learn about and work with.    Nobody who has ever done massage therapy for any length of time can deny the energy body is there – you can feel it.  Its  strong in young people and it gets very close to the body in elderly people, like a candle burning down. You can buy a cheap plasma ball at a science novelty store and watch this field interact with energetic plasma – its very real – and especially powerful in the finger tips.  I don’t believe it is the “spirit” or the “soul” but rather the energy side of the physical components of the body.   Einstein showed how energy and matter are just flip sides of the same coin.   What Einstein didn’t explain is what the coin is made out of.   But nobody never taught us that the energy we played with wasn’t real, perhaps they just had no explanation.  We never even thought twice about it.

My first encounter with a minister from the Radio Church of God (the original name of the Worldwide Church of God) was during one of our mock Army battles.     A white Plymouth Fury pulled up to sidewalk and out stepped this long drink of water, Vernon Hargrove.   He had jet black hair, skinny as a rail.  He wore a black suit.  And nobody wore a suit in the Arizona summers, and especially not a black one.   Vernon thought my mom was the one interested in the church, but dad had her do his letter writing.  It was my dad that was interested in the Radio Church of God.  My dad’s handwriting penmanship was unintelligible.  I never could read what he wrote and I always assumed that’s why he didn’t pen letters.  It wasn’t that he couldn’t spell, quite the opposite – he was quite literate.  His hand writing was a mess.    So there was my dad, mom and Vernon, and we were shooed back outside with our friends.

My parents didn’t know there was a church associated with the World Tomorrow radio broadcast.  But they were not allowed in until they read a certain number of articles, booklets and officially committed themselves to the church in baptism.   It was like joining a secret society, they wanted to make sure you were loyal first before they told you everything.    And “everything” consisted of anything the church wrote back to 1936.   About 6 months later we began attending the Radio Church of God – and it was creepy.

- More in the next installment -

I saw a movie on TV tonight.  In one scene a little boy grabs the CB radio mic and asks “what was I before I was born?”  He was hoping God would answer back on the radio.  It stirred a very old memory in me.

I asked that question when I was a little boy. I never got a straight answer from adults. Sometimes the answer was without mom and dad I wouldn’t be anything at all. Nothing?  How could I be nothing when I was very clearly something! Couldn’t I have been born to someone else in that case? If my parents married someone else, would I still be me? I knew I’d look different – but the me I was thinking of was the me observes my thoughts – the me behind the skin, the face, the muscles, the brain. My first theological question of life was never answered as a child, nor even most of my adult life.

Its still a good question.  It relates in a very direct way to what we are after we die and how we think of it. Are we just genetic dice thrown in random to some animal mating instinct in human beings?  Or is there a bigger game under foot?

I remember thinking at a very early age, “Its hard to be a human being”.  I remember wanting to go back to God.  I kid you not! I think I felt that way the first 4 or 5 years of my life.  I kept thinking how did I get here?  Why couldn’t I remember?

My father flew P-38 Mustangs in WWII over Germany. He spoke of the war often, so often I thought we were still at war in in 1960.  Then we heard about atomic bombs, and how Russians hated Americans and wanted to take away our freedoms and how they make their women work jobs like men do.  I couldn’t imagine my mom working and being my mom at the same time.  We had 5 kids at home and it was not long until there was a 6th. The world seemed such a dangerous place to a kid in 1960.

My mother used to take me and my older sister to Methodist Sunday school.  I didn’t mind Sunday school, but the songs we sang at age 4 and 5 seemed odd, nothing like what you heard on the radio and most of the boys in class would just mouth the words. Only the girls were really heard singing.  One day the Sunday School teacher gathered all of us children in a circle and began teaching us about Jesus.  Sunday School talked a lot about Jesus, we sang to Jesus.  I didn’t know why.  One day the teacher explained to us that Jesus was the Son of God and that made him a very special human being. She asked for questions, I raised my hand and asked her “how did he get to be a Son of God?”  She replied, “He lived a perfect life!”, thinking that was the end of my question.  I asked “If I live a perfect life will I be a Son of God?” I still remember the flustered look on her face, as if I had asked the un-askable question, “No! You will get to be an angel!”.  I remember thinking there was something odd in this – and something quite unfair and unequal in the way God decided his favorites. When I got home I asked my dad if I had to go to Sunday School anymore because I didn’t like it anymore – dad assured me I could stay home with him.  My father at that time was very non-religious.  And that ended my early life in the Methodist Church.

But that wasn’t the end of religion for me.

Dad had an autobody shop in downtown Scottsdale, in probably the oldest building in the town, a converted cotton gin made from corrugated steel.  My father was not much of a business man, but he was a tremendous craftsman,artist, and thinker.  During dad’s lunch hours, he’d read Plato, Immanuel Velikovsky, Buckminster Fuller, William F Buckley, we had the complete Great Books of the Western world at home. All the Greek classics as well European thinkers in history.  Dad’s favorite was The Histories by Herodotus. My father was also quite fond of poetry and had learned to memorize poetry in a one room school house as a boy on a Baker Montana Cattle ranch.

My father’s autobody shop sat behind an actual working blacksmith shop.  I remember the delight as a boy I would feel watching the blacksmiths forge iron with hammers and a forge of coal, and wonderful sparks that would fly off the white hot metal. Dad was quite handy with welding torch and worked wonders with sheet metal, something I think he learned as a mechanic early in on in his aviation career.  I had a very working class upbringing, and my fathers place of business was nothing impressive, in fact I was often embarrassed of it.

But what a mind my dad had, what honesty he had, and he had a loyal group of customers which included Senator Barry Goldwater.  My father did projects for Frank Lloyd Wright, one of which was painting the original Sunburst signs which pointed the way to Taliesin West, and after Wright died, dad was commissioned to mount a bronze bust of Frank Lloyd Wright upon a massive 2 foot wide cluster of amethyst crystals mined from the 4 Peaks amethyst mine.  No gemstone dealer in Arizona wanted to touch diamond drilling though such a priceless collection of amethyst, for fear of cracking it, but dad succeeded at it.

Dad worked a lot of late hours fixing cars for people. He had one of those old cathedral tube radios and on it he picked up Herbert W Armstrong and The World Tomorrow broadcast on XELO radio out of Mexico, and later KOY 550 Phoenix.  I think it was prophecy which hooked my dad. He had already been reading Immanuel Velikovsky’s World’s in Collision, so Dad was no stranger to alternative ideas, his mind was voracious for facts and history.

I didn’t know this until the death of my father in 1998, dad was in Military Intelligence during the Allied Invasion of North Africa, Sicily and Italy.  Dad always talked a lot about the Illuminati and the Vatican and their involvement in the politics of Europe.  I remember him telling me how much the Sicilian mafia hated Mussolini – they aided the Allies to get rid of him.  I never knew why he knew so much, my family just assumed he was a conspiracy nut, as did most of our WCG ministers. I mean he spoke of things that were never talked about on TV, and in my generation if it wasn’t on TV it didn’t happen.  But dad kept his Military Intelligence service secret from his children and everyone else.  Mom only told us after he died.  It was really strange because dad had a big mouth and loved to gab.  Soldiers in WWII trusted their government and they kept their oaths to their country – probably because their country had not yet given them reason to distrust the government.

More in the next installment….

William Ferguson
July 31, 2010

I was asked by the PT Blog to write an article for August. Its been a good while since I have written about Armstrongism.

I unplugged my web servers after 15 years of providing information on the WCG and Herbert Armstrong, probably a good year ago. It really wasn’t needed anymore and I was tired.  So many people have sprouted up that do that now so much better than I ever did it.   The Painful Truth has been online almost the same amount of time and has almost everything I had online.

I considered writing about some things I heard recently about the United Church of God recently requiring obviously loyal but Home-Office-politics disheartened ministers (and their wives) to sign letters of allegiance to UCG Home Office. Like HWA, they resort to “when in doubt, get the lawyers out”. But I just can’t be bothered. If you can’t see the deviancy of that behavior from the unreserved confidence Jesus showed his loyal disciples AND Judas, then God help you. Love thinks no evil of others. Love doesn’t ask for non-disclosure agreements and contracts of fidelity.

I’ve always respected writers who were honest about their biases. I will layout my “bias” straight up for you. I find some resonance in some Buddhist writings – but I am not a Buddhist. I especially like writings on Buddhist logic and the nature of reality, they seem to fit very well with quantum physics. My Christian views are probably more closely aligned to Unitarian Universalist than anything. That’s probably enough to stop many of you from reading further.

It is my view that what we call Christianity (in all its flavors) is directly a result of the Apostle Paul’s attempt to reconcile the ignominious death of Jesus into some cosmic significance. It could well be slight-of-hand by a Roman citizen to deflect Rome’s and its puppet collaborator regime in Jerusalem complicity in the act. Jesus death was a brutal murder by both church and state.   Rome had a political problem, and its problem was the diversity of religious belief in the empire.   It was politically important that Roman church/state be separated from the act of killing its own Jesus.  For centuries the Roman Church blamed the Jews. And what better why to obfuscate the death than to mystify in manner of the myths of Dionysus,  Mithra and Horus?

Paul made it all seem pre-ordained by angry sky-god demanding blood sacrifice for man’s sins – which is odd since the OT says God is not pleased with blood sacrifices and rather desires a contrite heart.  I have no problem with Jesus being a son of God, for the Jews said much the same – it was a common term for men considered prophets.   But the way its evolved in Christianity is that Jesus is the one and only son of God, and the rest of humans are just plum out of luck on that score.  Unless of course you buy into the religion and promise to spread it.

Jesus spent his entire ministry telling people he’s “the son of Man”. Literally “I’m a human being”.   You can’t get much closer to saying “I’m average guy!”  Paul wraps layers of recycled near eastern myths around the man.  I blame Paul loosely — more specifically the writings attributed to the man.  Scholars now know that some of those scriptures have been fiddled with, or in some cases were never authored by the man.

Paul is known to have had a female Apostle named Junia, quite in opposition to some of the writings attributed to Paul about women – putting the lie to the “God sanctioned” dis-empowerment of women from speaking in the church.

Still Paul came from a religion, Judaism, that did not believe in an afterlife but he did have all the cultural baggage of Greece as a Hellenized Jew. No human being exists in a vacuum; we are all a product of our surroundings.

Judaism is only concerned about the present life, it doesn’t speak to the afterlife. If Paul’s claims of being “a Pharisee among Pharisees” has any credibility at all, Jesus stead fast refusal to stay dead, truly must have tormented the man. How to explain such a thing? Jesus appearances and disappearances after his bodily death must have been somewhat disconcerting to what Paul had been taught to believe.  He probably hadn’t  yet paid off that  school loan to Gamaliel.

Those that insist on Torah being the path to eternal life are surely missing something rather basic about Judaism. The Torah was to show how to be a good Jew in this life. Jews didn’t believe (and still don’t) in the life after. There is evidence some Jews believed in reincarnation at the time of Jesus – they certainly asked Jesus enough if he was Elijah. How can any set of laws meant to be temporal to human life have any final word on the timelessness of the Spirit? Its illogical at its core.

What I mention is nothing new. These books are easily available and they are written in modern language. Whether you read them or not is a measure of your level of fear/superstition or your desire for truth.

I had a Near Death Experience following blood poisoning in 2009. They call them that, for lack of a better term. Its probably incorrect to call them a resurrection – for there very clearly is a medical technology component in man’s ability to revive people from conditions that would have ensured death of the body in another age. But the effect for the one experiencing it must be much the same.

When you meet your maker and have Him tell you the nature of human kind  – you listen. Yes me! Liberal self-congratulating-heretic me – needed to think bigger! Fair enough. I never claimed all knowledge. I had thought I had come a long ways. Some ways I had – but apparently not as far as I could go. I certainly spun myself out of the Armstrong orbit of tom foolery. But like all things about God, the learning is continual.

After being informed of what I lacked, actually it wasn’t phrased that way at all, it was more a statement of what I really was – what we all are – my reaction to it was a realization of what I lacked.  I was then sent back to my body where I recovered from the illness that I was supposed die from. The infection was gone. I did have a bit of physical therapy to do after 6 weeks in a hospital bed, but I relearned to eat and walk fairly quickly. And in a couple of months I could walk 3-6 miles.

Why was I sent back to my body? I don’t know I wasn’t told. I am nothing special, many thousands of people have had similar experiences – there are many books documenting them. The evidence Is overwhelming. There is even some within the Armstrong movement. I know, people have told me. People don’t tend to talk about things that are so completely different than what people think is the case. Few enjoy being ridiculed for what they know to be true. Nothing is more feared than death, but it is just a transition back to the God we came from. That of course doesn’t change the very real pain we feel when those we love and cherish die.  We miss their company.  Death is nothing to fear as you return to God! I do not pretend to know the what and how and why people come to be born on this earth. I got used to the idea of there being some mysteries a good while ago that I may never resolve before I die.   But I do cherish the gift of not having to worry anymore about death.  I know what awaits.  Its all good.   What remains is what kind of life I lead here in this world and how I make life better for others.

What I experienced was something so vivid and so real I didn’t want to come back to the pains of this life, let alone my hospital bed and life support tubes. I get queasy just from getting a blood sample drawn. I wanted to stay in that place of absolute acceptance and love. It was love that flowed like Arizona sunshine.  There was no condemnation there in that place. There was only love and compassion for how difficult it is to be a human being on earth with all the problems every human faces. And I thought a bit a fatherly pride for those of here.

The Armstrong churches express life’s difficulties as “trials”. I was never quite clear what the difference was between God’s trials and Satan’s temptations, except that when preachers fall, they claim the later.   And when members are told to do ridiculous things by their preachers its a trial from God.  I think that presents a rather sadistic impression of God. And if that’s your idea of God – I’d be tempted to call myself atheist to that kind of thinking.

What any human faces in this life is no different from what a group who hide themselves away behind closed doors and a religion experience. In fact I will go as far to say that part of the reason people suffer what they do is because humans all over this planet are continually separating and dividing over this or that, doctrine or politics, color of their skin or the stars on their bellies. We are meant to work together not forever dividing ourselves up by ever more means of judging our neighbors.

Buddha was right. Life on this earth is suffering, be you good or evil, rich or poor, no flesh gets out alive. But the Spirit that animates man and does come out alive and this is very empowering knowledge. You can pretend you have it and others don’t – because you accept Jesus or one group’s collection of what it believes is what Jesus wants them to do, it doesn’t change the reality that you are all Children of God. Buddha brought knowledge that life on this planet was for learning and that humans were trapped in a cycle of rebirth. It could be nothing else if our Spirit continues on. The spirit comes from God. Jesus brought knowledge that we are the Children of God and how to live with each other and that we are meant to be the Children of God and are to relate to the creator as we would a loving daddy (Abba). I do know we come from God and return to God. I know I had a form like my body when I met my maker, although my flesh was in hospital ICU room. We are, for lack of better words sparks from God, sparks that forever inseparable from God – for God is One. You may disbelieve me as my views are from my experience. That’s fine. It’s a hard thing to prove to anyone. And I don’t recommend what it takes to experience it.

Jesus said , having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, “The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is within you.” Check any translation you like, the words are there.

So much for watching world events. The Pharisees did that too. Jesus told them the Kingdom was within them. Unrealized or unrecognized perhaps, but still there.  Some people have hemi-head engines in their cars but never fully utilize that power either.  The human mind will only do what it believes it is capable of doing. We see this time and again with positive thinking. HWA was certainly a positive thinker when it came to his ambitions, although I doubt he ever gave credit to Norman Vincent Peale. We see it at work in Tony Robbins work with motivating people. We see it in hypnosis which can relieve pain without anesthesia and help people stop smoking and lose weight. The mind is a goal directed engine, but its goals and limits are flexible and often set ridiculously low in many people. We see it at work in athletes visualizing winning a race or game before they accomplish it.

How mankind got into the state we are in I don’t know.  That’s the real million dollar question.  There’s precious little in historical records, at least after the fire at the library of Alexandria at the hands of Rome. There are pyramids off shore from Japan and Cuba and stone structures all over the world older than 7000 years. Whatever it is that is going on this planet has been in place for at least 10,000 years.  It’s a system of slavery – the form of slavery has changed gradually in the last 1000 years, lately its slavery through national and personal debt. And religion itself is enslaved to this system of debt.  Religion chose mammon of God a long time ago.  It dates back at least as far as the silk and spice routes of Asia and still seems to include descendants of the same people who made a living from those routes. Not a lot new under the sun they say.

Its not that there’s any less money on the planet, all the gold ever mined is still in existence on earth. It just not your or my hands – and your pension funds have long been raided by exotic Wall Street derivatives.  Your State government is probably scrambling to meet its cash obligations to its pension funds after being raided by Wall Street.   All this new found frugality is not an accident, its the largest wholesale case of piracy the earth has ever seen.   Its all about control and making sure you are kept in a state of semi-deprivation so that you can be controlled.  98% of all wealth in the USA is owned by 2% of the population.

It’s a speculation of mine that the trees in the garden of Eden can interpreted another way. One tree, the tree of good and evil can be thought of as a tree of darkness and light. Same meaning really. A way of life that seeks knowledge of and by the self for gratification of the self or the group the self belongs to. A path to knowledge that sequesters knowledge into priesthoods, secret societies, financial/trading cabals, and military secrets. It’s a path that profits from excluding others from knowledge. It thrives on secrets.

The other tree was the tree of Life, utilizing the full resources of all the God-spirit imbued humans in an open and free life affirming manner. The Tree of life is a bit like Open Source knowledge. The utilizing of the natural tendency of human beings to collaborate and share to find solutions to problems.

Perhaps we can envision a time long ago when the Children of God wanted to experiment, and God gave them the freedom to do so for a time and learn of its consequences, knowing that He would always be there for them and always had the last word when the experiment came to its inevitable conclusion in its attempt to be separate from God.

Ultimately their experiment lead to violence, and violence led to fear, and fear led to a belief they were separated from God.  After all why would a good God allow freedom to do this to themselves?   They invented all kinds of sacrifices, deeds, penances, and torments for themselves as long as they didn’t have to see the God that was within them and recognize it in each other. But God was still there. Governments had formed, priesthoods and religions created, and banks and industries dedicated to destruction of the fleshly bodies of the Children of God.

Whenever they came close to waking from this horrible nightmare, someone or another would do some heinous act of violence and destruction to keep fear high. Because when fear is high, humans descend to the level of animals and are easily herded. What people needs a national defense when all people love other humans? And without those wars, where will banks make easy money putting countries and their people into perpetual debt and death. It’s a very old song and dance on this planet.

If there is an “end of the age” as the Bible speaks of, its surely the end of this self-perpetuated nightmare mankind has got itself into. I cannot believe the God I met in my darkest hour, is the type of God that plans a scenario like in the movie 2012 or Herbert Armstrong’s most dire apocalyptic wet dream. Far from it. But I am sure there are powers that would like you to believe that about God.  They feed on fear.

You are all children of the Creator. That gives you a certain sovereignty by birthright. You were not meant to be victims of spiritual pickpockets. God is near, God is within you, but you need to learn a little stillness to listen to that source.  In time you will learn of its power.

Once you do, you will learn that you were never separated from God, you only hid yourself from God. God was always there. If it took Jesus to open your eyes to God, then thank God for that. If you arrived there by another route, thank God for that too. He’s still there waiting with open arms for his Children.   God doesn’t have a religion.

Turn off the news. Very few outlets even broadcast news anymore and those that do only exist to make you afraid or fill you with trivia about fallen Hollywood personalities. They especially want you to be afraid of freedom, democracy and the free flow of information.

The powers that currently rule you want you trust in secrets and lies.

But they shall not rule you for much longer.  They’ve driven themselves into bankruptcy in their greed for power.  And God has other plans to restore you.

The noisy brain is well known concept among mental health professionals. Dr. John Ratey expanded on that concept in his book, Shadow Syndromes. Autism can lead to a condition where most of the brain generates an electrical storm when someone touches those who have it. Schizophrenia causes overload from too much mental noise. Teens with ADHD notice when they are on Ritalin that the noise level drops. One son told her mother when he got back from school after taking Ritalin, “Mom, it’s so quiet!”. Mentally ill people generally have noisy brains from a genetic predisposition. Often stress can set in motion a psychotic break when a person can no longer tolerate the noise aggravated by stress.

At the second Hope and Recovery Conference I attended, my wife and I were sitting at a table during lunch with a young woman working in the mental health profession. I had realized from my experience with those who were mentally ill that the standard mental illnesses, such as Bipolar Disease, Schizophrenia and Psychosis involve distorted perception. The young woman said she always knew it: It made sense. She was very unhappy when she couldn’t demonstrate that she had ever thought it about it before.

That’s the trick, you know: People say things others immediately recognize as an aphorism, and they believe that they have always believed it. This is, of course, distorted perception.

Distorted perception certainly seems to be implicated in a noisy brain. Moreover, as the “noise level” in the brain increases, the person usually becomes dysfunctional.

Organizations often seem to be victimized by distorted perception resulting in a high noise level which leads to a completely dysfunctional environment. Communications break down from the noise, there is a lack of standards, there is no auditing of results or ongoing processes; in fact, there can be no measurement of any kind of metrics, since nobody seems to know what the immediate and long term goals are.

Armstrongists have a firm belief that they know where they are going: The Kingdom of God! Armstrongists know how to get there: Keep the Ten Commandments — along with a whole lot of other stuff they can’t prove that’s required. Armstrongists know the future because they have the only roadmap on the face of the earth — the one created for them by Herbert Armstrong. To tell an Armstrongist that he or she does not have a clue will only end up their telling you that you have “A root of bitterness” — a self fulfilling prophecy if there ever was one.

What the Armstrongists don’t seem to understand is how utterly pathetic and directionless they are. They got that way because of the very common structure found universally among those with noisy brains:

1. Lack of planning
2. Lack of commitment
3. Lack of communications
4. Autocratic control
5. Arbitrary change in direction
6. Noisy brains [a tautology here!]
7. Unrestricted flow of ideas
8. Lack of discipline
9. No documentation

Armstrongist community leaders are infamous for these traits.

It can’t be healthy.

Anyone going back through the history of postings in The Painful Truth should begin to get a pattern of the scenario that results from the noisy brain. For example, one man working at Ambassador College noted to his superiors that there were patterns to income. What a concept — that there were reasons for the ebb and flow of money, and, if they noted, analyzed and graphed the waning and waxing of the dollars, associated with various events during the year — such as feast offerings — the administration should be able to plan. He was rebuffed, of course. No planning required. Just have faith in God: He will provide. Of course, Proverbs does advise us to be diligent to know the state of our flocks and herds, but Armstrongists don’t actually use Scripture for a practical guide in their lives. They are fools: They only listen to what they want to hear.

That is why, when you point out that British Israelism is a lie and Herbert Armstrong was a false prophet — 1975 never happened — they bluster about how we should respect Herbert Armstrong because he brought us the truth. The truth?! Wait! What?! Hey, hey now. Let’s face it: He just made stuff up. Mostly. Or robbed other people’s ideas and pretended they were his. Two weeks ago I talked with a minister of the Church of God Seven Day. He brought up the fact that Herbert Armstrong plagiarized material from their booklets and then the Worldwide Church of God sued the Church of God Seventh Day. It didn’t get far when the CoG7 produced the booklet they wrote in the 1930s from some file in a basement somewhere. But that’s the danger from all that noise, you see: They make big mistakes because of the delusions from their distorted perceptions. This isn’t to say that the Armstrongist community leaders are mentally ill. It’s more complicated than that. They are also often criminals.

All of the noise leads to chaos.

So many things in the Armstrongist community make no sense at all: UCG wanting to relocate near a Superfund Toxic Waste Site [now there's a real failure to plan]. How about the front page of The Good News with that picture of the latest, greatest tool of God’s Work, the IBM Data Cell. It was back to the hard disk drives within the year because the product was a failure and not such Good News after all. The Armstrongists are terribly inconsistent. Sure, they keep the Sabbath. Then they go out and make their manservant and maidservant work for wages on it. That is not consistent with Nehemiah and Ezra. If you’re going to keep the Law of Scripture, then you need to use all the Old Testament Scriptures, if you expect to be an effective Old Testament Christian.

The folks who worked in the Data Processing Center at Ambassador College told me of the internal chaos in the Data Center there. They had to roll with the punches. One described how they had to stack chairs on top of tables and work there while a channel was cut in the cement in the floor. And you have to know, not all of those runs on the Sabbath were totally unattended, though most were.

People would be accepted for a job at Ambassador College, sell their homes, pack up, move clear across the United States, only to discover that their job with the church had disappeared on the way. This didn’t just happen once.

I remember well in the local church, a girl who had appendicitis. She could not get treatment from a doctor. She survived, but her health was never what it should have been. Just 10 years later, the church changed the doctrine so people could see doctors and “be healed” by them. The ministers were advised to hide the faith healing to prevent the church from being sued: Lie for the sake of the church.

The real indication of how chaotic the church really was, though, lies in the fact that Garner Ted Armstrong committed date rape against, by his own estimate by 1972, 200 coeds. In spite of the fact that his father knew about this [and even though he claimed he didn't, he was still culpable -- but, then, he really did know] and was an accessory after the fact. These were criminal acts. Herbert Armstrong covering it up was a criminal act. They should have all gone to prison. Roderick Meredith — that paragon of virtue [in the utterly ironic sense] — also knew about it, did some mental wringing of his hands, gritted his teeth, and preached sermons about keeping God’s Law. The men who attended AC and became ministers knowingly married the women who had been raped. Then they went on to allow themselves to be directed by the very man who had raped the women who had become their wives. This, in turn, resulted in a great deal of bitterness and years of anger for those ministers who compromised themselves by keeping quiet, saying and doing nothing, tolerating the intolerable, pretending to be good friends with GTA and Herbert Armstrong, all the while driving themselves to distraction with the noise of the dysfunctional environment leading to the utter chaos. Now some of them, at least, have a psychiatrist treating them for clinical depression. That is something of an irony, given the teaching of the original Radio Church of God.

The Armstrongist community makes no sense. Furthermore, they can’t prove that they can get you to the Kingdom of God. The leaders are of no worth, and, today, are struggling themselves to come up with a reason for their own being. There doesn’t seem to be much more than keeping their salary, trying to keep a cushy but dysfunctional job and getting retirement. That — and for some of those in the upper echelon of the so-called leadership, which is nothing of the sort — basking in the glow of people who worship them in their idolatrous admiration. Furthermore, even though they know all this, they won’t change a thing. They don’t to risk anything left of the Armstrongist Empire of which they may still have a piece.

It’s like the Keystone Cops and the Three Stooges trying to maintain the Winchester Mansion.

You really should ask yourself the question, just how can these people make my life better? They don’t seem to be doing a very good job of running their own lives. Why should we expect anything at all from them except noisy dysfunctional chaos?

The best peace you can have is moving as far away from the Armstrongist community as possible, for, if you keep drinking from the poisoned well, you will take on their chaos.

My book, Assertive Incompetence — An Introduction to Management Malpractice, has been a worthless failure, because… we’ll get to that at the end.

Armstrongists don’t realize that there is an entire Seventh Day Church of God out there, publishing literature world wide and keeping the Feasts annually, including the Feast of Tabernacles. The Feast of Tabernacles with the Seventh Day Church of God is a totally different experience than the one in the Armstrongist churches of God. It is more like a Bible Camp. Actually, it is a Bible Camp. There may be some tents that people put up, but there are campers these days with a bed and a simple sink and toilet with running water and enough electricity for a light and a few small appliances. There is generally a communal kitchen where the ministers and members together cooperatively prepare the meals. There are a few motel style cabins available. You see where the Feast was kept in Washington State in 2008 here:

http://www.fruitlandbiblecamp.com/fbc_2008_002.htm

The “services” are quite a bit different too. It isn’t all hymns, opening prayer, sermonette, hymn, announcements, hymn, sermon, hymn and closing prayer, although there is often a flavor of that. Services are bit more informal and there may be, occasionally, some gospel singing group come in and perform. There is Bible Study at 7:00 AM, breakfast, activities, services, lunch and… well, it varies. At night, around 7:30 PM, there’s another service with a sermon. It is as quaint and rustic as you might expect, and about 25 miles from the nearest town of any size.

The Seventh Day Church of God has been keeping the Feasts since 1919 when Gilbert G. Rupert championed them.

The Seventh Day Church of God has noted the problems with the official Jewish calendar in general use: The Spring Equinox is not April 6 / 7. That’s not scientific. Therefore, they prepare their own holy day calendar which is published and sent world wide each year. Paul Woods is the minister who currently maintains the calendar. I did talk to Mr. Woods [who is the current editor of The Herald of Truth] about the calendar in 2008, briefly, but there were a couple of other things we discussed. One of them was about the Lord’s Supper and the Passover. Those are separate events as one can see from the Scriptures — 24 hours apart. The Days of Unleavened Bread begin on the evening of the Passover — which the Armstrongists keep instead as the Night to Be Much Observed.

One of the things we discussed was the topic of Herbert Armstrong’s baptism. It turns out that Herbert Armstrong was baptized by A.H. Stith, of the Seventh Day Church of God and the baptism was witnessed by Mr. Stith’s daughter. My response was, “Herbert Armstrong lied? I’m shocked!”. I wasn’t really, but fortunately, Paul Woods has a fine sense of irony as well as being a very nice minister.

That the Seventh Day Church of God keeping the Feasts falls well beneath the radar of the Armstrongists, should not be a surprise. Who would tell you? Herbert Armstrong? What incentive would he have?

Nevertheless, there are some customs and practices which are universal. One of those involves the power and privilege of special classes of people in the Churches of God. Remember that the Sabbath keeping Churches of God have been around a lot longer than the Armstrongist ones. People grow up in families in the Churches of God and they know each other with a long history of association. Word gets around and they are a tight knit group.

A family was going to attend the Feast of Tabernacles with the Seventh Day Church of God. The rule was, first come, first served. If you got there late and didn’t get the better accommodations, that was just too bad. Like or lump it. Except, except. Some of the ministers were going to come in late, so, against the official rules, certain accommodations were set aside to make provisions for them. Sound familiar? So the family came to the Feast in plenty of time, but were told that they would have to take other accommodations — the not, shall we say, very good ones. So the teenager, Nicholas, had to stay in a very small cramped space in one of these campers. Night passes. He sleeps. He wakes up and 18 inches from his face is this big RAT! He shrieks! They’re outta there. That’s just what power and special privilege can do for you.

And where there’s one rat, you can be sure that there are plenty more.

You can be sure the ministry had better digs. After all, aren’t they worthy of a double portion? Maybe so, back in the days of the First Century AD, when ministers could be and were martyred. These days, the real risk for the ministry is dropping dead of a heart attack or stroke from excessive consumption of meat and drink.

If you were looking for the finer things of life at the Feast, count your blessings.

Rats!

How disappointing.

The story is reminiscent of the one where a poor married man with an unbelieving spouse came to the Feast alone and ended up in a motel room. First night off, he hears noises. He turns on the light. The cockroaches scramble for cover. He’s got an infestation. He goes to the motel manager, tells him the story. The motel manager says, “There you go, just keep the lights on!”. The poor man left.

Rats and cockroaches aren’t the only infestations in this world. There are many more, for example, termites.

My first experience with termites was as a lad. My dad had a pile of wood and pointed out some termites in it. Fortunately, that was pretty much my last experience with them. They are so insidious: They come into a building and set up shop. They start doing what comes naturally and begin eating up the support timbers. They are good at hiding. If they happen to break through the wall, they cover it up immediately to prevent discovery. No one hears or sees them until the day the whole place collapses.

If you are not convinced, then you should see articles about the Formosan Termite imported in the wood of the crates made to ship property of GIs home from the Pacific after World War II. They have made a meal of much of the New Orlean’s French Quarter. They have spread far and wide throughout much of United States warm and wet South. They are aggressive and love all things cellulose, including, but not restricted to, wood, paper, fruits, nuts, cork and live plants, and they’ll gnaw or squeeze their petite little bodies through virtually anything to get to their food, including electrical wires, plaster, plastic, and the tiniest cracks in concrete. They get into everything.

Several tell of the story of the water skier on Lake Loma that came down in on an island on the lake into a nest of poisonous snakes and, according to the account, died instantly. I have my doubts: There was probably a lot of pain and agony for a few minutes.

Most of the time, an infestation begins with only one. That was certainly the case with the Radio Church of God — which then became the Worldwide Church of God. And not to put too fine a point on it, after the nest is established, some break off to establish a new nest, and then, later, they break off, and so on and so on. The Tkatches were interesting because they were an internal infestation, infesting the infestation!

Now, Herbert Armstrong was bad enough, but Roderick Meredith has managed to spin off toxic infestations — a lot more than you may think. And, yes, United has managed to spin off dozens of infestations, while Gerald Flurry’s and John Rittenbaugh’s nests have been mostly contained, but Meredith has really done a lot of collateral damage in ways you can barely begin to imagine. Global: Now there’s a nest that managed to implode in on itself. The pests, sometimes called “ministers”, scurried off to invade communities far and wide. But you know, it isn’t like we shouldn’t have been able to see it coming: You should take a look again at his “Manpower Papers”. If that didn’t give us all a clue to the future, nothing would. These infestations always do what they are programmed by the Universe to do — what comes naturally to all psychopaths, sociopaths and narcissists. Without them, there would probably never be any infestations.

Today we will concentrate on a small infestation in Oregon which you may have never heard of: The Church of God in Peace and Truth — terms which are manifestly self contradictory. The progenitors of the nest are the Haneys, which, again, you are probably blessed never to have heard of.

Every year, it is always a challenge, for my wife wants to go somewhere really good for vacation. To me the Feast of Tabernacles is not a vacation. It is a lot of inconvenient effort which generally ends up to be “interesting” as in the old Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”. Last year, I chose a spot which looked benign, Bend, Oregon. Safely nestled between the Independent’s Feast Site and United’s, I figured, what the hey, what could go wrong, right? We knew people who were relatively civilized who were attending, so it seemed like a good idea — sort of like the movie, “The Magnificent Seven” where the guy explained why he jumped into a cactus patch without any clothes on: “It seemed like a good idea at the time”.

It was a promising start. Nestled in the high desert country of Oregon, the Shiloh Inn in Bend had a one bedroom apartment with a full kitchen, a leather couch and big leather chairs in front of the fireplace. It was the nicest accommodations there — and most expensive. The entire Church of God in Peace and Truth had come to the Shiloh Inn complex to keep the Feast of Tabernacles and my wife and I had the best accommodations, right across from the conference room where the services were held. The deacon and the deaconess who had been a part of the defense with United against the UCG stalker at the court that issued the restraining order were there as well, since their son was married to the daughter of the presiding minister. The people attending were really nice people. The main congregation was based out of Gold Hill, where there were about 50 people. The minister, Don Haney, was first in Worldwide, then in Global. The main congregation was from Living and they ended up the way they were because their Living minister was very terrible to them in ways that are hard to imagine, but have become standard fare. We were well set up and things looked promising (for a change).

I knew from the first that trouble was ahead. Don Haney said in the first third of his sermon, “I am going overtime” — in a church that proclaimed they lived by the Ten Commandments, one of which is, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor”!?! Stealing our time?! That’s just rude! He saw me cross my arms and we were off and running in an adversarial relationship. I got to see how bad things were by reading the first few chapters of his booklet [I couldn't stomach reading the whole thing], “Satan’s Seat of Tyranny,” where he took his misgivings concerning the Living Church of God and Roderick Meredith to a whole new plateau. From the front cover: “Its damaging rule over the Church of God” and “The bonds of restraint broken by the freedom of God’s Truth!”. From the back middle paragraph:

“However, Much of God’s Church Has Been Subjected to a Pyramid of Power and Intimidation, Which Has Hurt and Unnecessarily Divided God’s People, Thereby Impeding the Spreading of the Good News. Those in “POWER” Have interpreted Scripture for and Exercised Authority Over Those They Have Subjected to Themselves for So Long That They Seem to Have Cultivated an Even Greater Influence Over Some in God’s Church Than the Direct Authority of God’s Written Word!”.

I have to admit that I understand the sentiment: Roderick Meredith  is like a community organizer whose sole purpose is to create havoc, divide people, for the sole purpose of self aggrandizement. His swelling ego was a result of his winning the Golden Glove regional boxing championship and then finding his way to Herbert Armstrong who was impressed that Meredith was “a man of quality”. It’s all heady stuff to be set on a pedestal by a highly successful cult leader. The admiration and its results differ little from the current U.S. government political landscape. Roderick Meredith ended up having a lot of power and influence: He was over the students at Ambassador College and he directed the ministers from headquarters. After Herbert Armstrong, he was a god in his own right. His opinions were law and he could oppress people, insult and abuse them, just about any way he chose as a harsh, hard slave merciless slave driver who assumed that he was a Man’s Man because of his being a winner. He didn’t see the real truth: He was a testosterone poisoned, brain shunken despot whose cruelty was legendary. He ended up spawning rebellious leaders who couldn’t wait to get out from under his control, only to set up their own fiefdoms of despotism. After all, he bankrupted his own church, Global, just out of spite.

It was as if Roderick Meredith said, “You haven’t treated me as the GOD I know I am, so I’m going to sink you and do a number on you!”. The sermon in Kansas City was one to remember when he told his congregation that he “would abide by the decision of the council” of elders in Global. He lied. You have to remember that Roderick Meredith has said, “I have never committed a MAJOR sin”. You know, like Adultery. At least not in the carnal sense. I suspect he has missed something in Revelation 22. You know the part where it says that liars will not enter into the Kingdom of God? He doesn’t seem very well positioned for repentance. I occasionally wonder in an off moment whether he has committed the unpardonable sin. It is this rebellion that has, in itself, spawned even more rebellion among those chaffing under his harsh relentless despotism, promulgating even more despots rebelling against his egocentric malignancy. I do often wish he would repent to reduce the massive harm he has done, but I doubt that he can really face himself in the spiritual mirror.

Trust me when I say that Satan’s Seat of Tyranny is the worst written booklet I have ever seen, but is filled with totally rank hypocrisy. [And yes, the author DID capitalize all those words!] He took his hatred and anger of the administration of Roderick Meredith to a whole new level. His basic theory: We will all come to live under the Laws, Statutes, Judgments and Testimonies of Scripture, and, from the Return of Jesus Christ on, it will be an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth as the judges determine — and to hell with what Jesus said in Matthew 5:38-39. He was the very picture of the Pharisee as an Old Testament Christian. Here’s how it works: You are just fine as long as you do everything he tells you to do and wants you to do, without any hesitation. He is perfect. And under his administration, there’s no room for mercy, just blood letting. His congregation was fine with that. I suspect they were Stockholmed. If Haney really wanted to see Satan’s Seat of Tyranny, all he had to do is look at his backside in a mirror.

I met a young man at the Feast. His father was an Elder. His mother was with United. He had set up shop, so to speak, with his girlfriend in Eugene, and while things had started out fine with their live in arrangements, he was out of a job and not doing well. He got enough money to leave the Feast in the middle, to go back to his live-in girlfriend and get into the State’s job program. Since Don Haney made so much of how we were all going to [be forced to] keep all the Old Testament Laws, Statutes, Judgments and Testimonies, that I told him my expectation: That he, as the minister of the church, would obey the judgments in the New Testament and obey the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 5 and put the fornicator out of the church. His response, “He’s left the Feast”. No can do. Not my problem. It took care of itself. And the whole congregation felt good about themselves for having such “love”.

No wait! What!?! Hey, hey now!

You see, I didn’t really care about the man committing the fornication. This was a matter for the congregation and the minister. After all, if you proclaim that the Laws, Statutes, Judgments and Testimonies are going to be kept — all the way for beatings and replacing sheep and oxen, to death for those who commit kidnapping — surely, SURELY, the minister is going to keep what the New Testament says to do in his own congregation today. The truth is, he won’t. That also explains why Garner Ted Armstrong was able to get away with committing date rape with 200+ [by his own estimate] Ambassador College Coeds, in full view of Herbert Armstrong, who was responsible for the whole mess. Instead of prison, he got lots of money, fame and position — until he didn’t, only because the whole matter became too public and SOMEBODY HAD TO DO SOMETHING, even though the damage was done: Leaving a legacy of hopelessness for the ministers who later married the coeds and have had to deal with clinical depression from their anger ever since. It’s too bad so many get locked into the infestation in their warm little nests.

In the end, we lived well — even in the ankle deep snow that fell in early October, snarling up traffic and making it impossible for some to get to services in Sun River and Redmond. We sat in the big comfortable leather chairs in front of the fireplace in our own little fiefdom. We ate well [I fancy myself to be a good cook]. We slept soundly. We had peace, though not the peace of the Church of God. If living well is the best revenge, then we had our revenge. It is also best to observe a drama without getting drawn into it. We also really yucked it up by taking Haney’s preposperous propositions to their logical extreme: We supposed that we should all carry paddles at the Feast for when we needed to relieve ourselves! No one could figure out why my wife and I were breaking out in laughter! Hey, it’s the Law… or maybe Statute: We have to do it! That’s what everyone will do in the Millennium, so we’d better get used to it now! Forget toilets and water closets: God wants us to carry paddles!

The people in the Church of God in Peace and Truth are still nice people, except for the minister. I assume that afterwards, the minister took his posse and went hunting in the wilds of Oregon as he said he would. He lives a comfortable life and he is master of all he surveys. Things would be perfect for him, except for ALL THAT ANGER. It just can’t be good for you to hold it like that. It’s all a comfortable little nest of infestation which will continue for some time to come.

Near the end, I encountered someone I had first met in the Radio Church of God in 1963. I told him United was a cult. He told me that I had the root of bitterness. It is interesting that when an infestation is exposed, the nest bands together immediately to cover up their incursion. That’s how they manage to stay the cults they are, and “the root of bitterness” is yet another tool of the tools who make up the infestation. It’s what narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths always do: Seek first the destruction of credibility of truth seekers and ye shall inherit the nest of infestation. Next time you hear that you have a root of bitterness, just point out that they are attempting a coverup — they don’t want the truth at all because they like their lies too much — and they’ve just proved the points you just made ["Truth! You can't handle the truth!"]

This year, the Church of God in Peace and Truth moves their venue for the Feast of Tabernacles from the desert mountain high country [God's country?] to the beach [and there will be no more oceans] at the Embassy Suites in Mandalay Beach, California. For us? Never again. High concept about how things should work out is often disappointing in unanticipated ways — and we do not fear a tidle wave — it’s just that the hypocrisies of these infestations are not something I want during the only really good time to get away — even if it isn’t my idea of a fun time. I’ve had one too many laps in the cesspools of the Churches of God to appreciate the kind of hypocrisy home grown in the toxic infestations of hypocrisy. Better it is to be with someone who’s made a terrible mistake and learned from it than to join with those who are self righteous ungodly godly people who ARE IN CHARGE! I can get all I want of that from work at taxpayer expense.

I don’t know, but I suppose that if I were God, I would wonder if the leaders of the Churches of God would ever do what I said to do of their own volition.

The infestation of the Armstrongists is the worst kind of infestation: The leaders are parasites, living off the host. They take the resources of the host and live from it, providing nothing in return and making the host progressively more sick. When the host can provide no more, it is cast off. The infestation of the Armstrongist parasites then moves on and finds another host to live on.

Yellowstone Park has signs, DON’T FEED THE BEARS! Each year there are a few who do not heed the warning. But the bears have such appeal. So some roll down their windows and give the poor bears a sandwich. Have you ever heard the expression, Hungry as a bear? It’s a reality. The people who run out of food soon find the bear goes from fun to frightening. They will tear the car apart looking for more food. So the Armstrongists seemed to have such appeal. We fed them our “tithes”. That wasn’t enough. They wanted offerings. Then they wanted long term loans. Then, heck, send everything. Then they tore us apart. To add insult to injury, they grabbed the wheel and drove off, leaving us stranded along the side of the road. DON’T FEED THE BEARS! Let them survive or die in their natural habitat. Otherwise, you will have an infestation of parasites you will have a difficult time exterminating.

Moreover, all the sacrifices you have made for the parasite infestation — that made you feel so good about yourself — are completely useless, since you helped support something which was harmful, not just to yourself and your family, but to the rest of the Armstrongist community. Now the toxins left behind by the infestation are even harder to rid oneself from than the parasites themselves, because the toxins not only have weakened you, but left guilt and the feeling of stupidity besides. What you have to remember is that this is what they do and they are not really a part of you and never were. They just fed off of you. It will make it easier to walk away by putting the blame on the real culprits: They had a good spiel, we paid for it, now we have an opportunity to get better. Learn from the con and move on to live your own life, not theirs.

Like so many other kinds of infestations, those involving scoundrels often start in the same place and end the same way.

As for my book,  Assertive Incompetence — An Introduction to Management Malpractice, being a worthless failure, it’s all because the information is all there about narcissists, psychopaths and sociopaths: Their methods, approaches and processes — but no one actually uses the information but me. Properly used, it could have prevented the current administration, but people love their little nests of infestations, living off of hope, which is merely an unfulfilled illusion, relying on useless saviors, which leads to disappointment.

That’s all I have to say. For now.

It’s been nearly 50 years now — five decades; half a century — that the Armstrongist churches of God have declared war on my family. I just hadn’t realized it until now. I’m a technologist. Stupid fool people stuff is not my thing.

It always starts out the same. I’m curious, perhaps to an unprecedented degree. Curiosity drives me as a truth seeker. As a truth seeker, I embrace new things which have promise rather immediately. After all, if it is true, it is probably a good thing to pursue, right? The truth will set you free and all that. More than that, truth is interesting. The problem is with that tiny little word, if.

It isn’t long that people associated with this new “truth” (new to me and maybe not so true) begin to notice that someone is rooting around in their root cellar where they don’t want anyone looking. Those things lurking were never supposed to be found. The lies and deceptions upon which the “truth” were built threaten to destroy their prosperous little enterprise. This works for churches, governments, business and academia equally.

Instead of welcoming correction, these people position themselves well to protect the lies upon which their social order is constructed. They aren’t just defensive, they are downright aggressively vicious and will rally themselves to galvanize against any invaders. It’s like that Disney nature video where the wasp falls into the ant nest. Soon there is nothing left of the wasp but wings and feathers.

And so it is with the Armstrongist churches of God. They seem so sociable at first, hoping for your support in the form of money and giving over your personal power for the aggrandizement of their narcissistic leadership. The lies always threaten to sink their leadership, take away what they come to think is their money and cause their rather tenuous built-on-a-house-of-cards structure of outright delusional destructive fantasies to crumble.

It isn’t enough for me to gain the proof of how anachronistic the social order is. I must do the high concept thing of projecting the logical conclusion of the outcome, if everyone does exactly what they are supposed to do in the nonsensical framework of absolute dysfunction. Let me give you a concrete example from the real world.

I work for a county which has built a rather magnificent Emergency Operations Center (EOC) for $10 Million. It is an impressive work. It looks like those centers you see on TV with all the monitors high on the wall in every direction, dozens of tables with PC workstations and telephones. Just what you need for some emergency, like an earthquake or Mount Rainier blowing its stack. Not to be outdone, they also have a $600,000 mobile EOC in a massive trailer which can be moved at any time with the attached semi. Now mind you, I’m not certain how effective the mobile EOC would be in an emergency with all the communications gear and such, because it is setting right next to the EOC building in the parking lot. If you can’t get to the EOC building, how could you get the mobile EOC? These are the sorts of questions that county officials just hate to hear. In fact, they don’t hear them: They don’t listen to criticism at all, constructive or not. They made the decisions, and the decisions are wise ones. Who are you to question THEM!?! How like the churches of God. Anyway, the location of the EOC is secret. Did I say secret? With a simple search of about 10 minutes, you can get not only the location of the EOC, but detailed floor plans and building specifications. You see, the county had to go out to bid. Part of the bid process was to find vendors to build the thing. To find the vendors for the RFP, they had to post the plans on the Internet, and, as you know, things posted on the Internet never really go away. So there you have it: In times of terrorists, the terrorists will probably have the location and layout of the EOC. Brilliant, I say!

The EOC has a computer room. You would expect that. Important stuff would be on computers to help with any emergency. Planning was a bit lacking. There has been unending battles to try to keep the air conditioning operationally adequate. During hot days in summer, they had to open the doors and use portable fans to cool the room. Later, they got portable air conditioners and vented them through the open doors. Then there was the circuitry. You have to know that the toaster and microwave oven are on the same circuit as the servers in the computer room. And, yes, people have taken down the servers with their toast and heating their lunch in the microwave. My suggestion is that they don’t use both the toaster and the microwave at the same time, or their servers will be toast. There’s nothing like great planning! Nothing like it. It doesn’t seem to exist. They can conceptually plan for an emergency, but the Devil, as they say, is in the details. And remember, a county is a complex place. And this is just one SMALL example.

Anyway, you can imagine that the Armstrongist churches of God are not at all pleased when people come along and point out that the Emperor not only doesn’t have any clothes, but he has a nasty rash that needs to be treated. We have a more contemporary version of the fable of the Emperor’s new clothes (which don’t exist). The kid points out what everyone sees, but don’t admit. “The Emperor has no clothes,” the kid says. The crowd gives the parents a nasty glare. The parents shush the kid up. “But he doesn’t!” The parents, with the “encouragement” of the Emperor’s staff find a psychiatrist to treat the poor kid for his delusions. He’s put on Ritalin. It doesn’t help him of course. The last we heard of him, the kid grew up in a mental institution, is in a straight jacket, given psychotropic drugs and is safely hidden away from ever being able to tell the truth. You might agree that this could have happened in the old Soviet Union, but folks, the United States Corporations have adopted the worst of the old Soviet Union Corporate model and implemented it badly — replete with ineffective five year plans. Government has adopted the worst of the Corporate model and implemented it badly, with twists of its own, since government doesn’t have to make a profit and will survive no matter how far in the red it goes. I’ve never heard of a government agency declaring bankruptcy, but it seems like we’re about due for a massive declaration any time now. All because people don’t want to face the truth. Better to live on lies than do the real work of dealing with the difficult challenges by using reasonable process and discipline. The quick fix of lies in a dysfunctional environment is far preferable to the long uphill hard work which is really needed to resolve the problems.

And so it is with the Armstrongist Churches of God which declare that if they find the truth, they will adopt it and correct everything that is wrong. It is a lie. They lie; they cover up the lie; they cover up the cover ups; they make everything undiscussable and then go on to do something really stupid. If you need an example, look at the UCG. They spent years getting established in the Cincinnati area. They bought property and built their buildings. They paid it off. Then why, in heaven’s name, did they decide to move to Texas a mile or so from a Superfund Toxic Waste site? And they weren’t about to, in typical Armstrongist fashion, back down until the whole thing became excruciatingly and unavoidably public. It is only excessive force that will at all influence these suspicious people from doing all the wrong things for all the wrong reasons. The innocent are destroyed as a casual collateral damage because in their preposterous egoism, no one else counts but them, because they are in charge, and, by cracky, you better believe that Almighty God put them in charge and if you oppose them in any way, you will be dealt with by the rather Retentive Creator of all the universe who is offended by the slightest hint of rebellion, no matter how well intentioned it is to keep people from utter destruction — or more like, rather inconvenient consequences. When you have money and power, you can cover up your mistakes rather handily, it seems.

The story of my brother, Bruce, isn’t the only skirmish in the war that the Armstrongist churches of God has declared against me and my family. There are too many incidences to recount in one place. The CoG cultmeister from Australia springs to mind, but he’s not the only one by a long shot. It’s not even just about my family. The Armstrongist churches of God have declared war on many other families. Today, we will examine one of them.

Back in the early 1960s, a psychopathic con man came from the Philippines and ended up associated with the Radio Church of God. He was married to a very sincere devout white woman who had grown up as a Catholic, but has become very much a part of the Armstrongist church of God landscape and who is totally dedicated to Armstrongist teachings. Her husband claimed that he was a doctor in the Philippines and had managed to convince a real medical doctor in the church, state board certified to be a practitioner, that he was he, too, was a qualified doctor. The man from the Philippines, as you would have expected, ended up wrecking the real medical doctor’s career. There was nothing left of Dr. J’s practice when R finished with him. But R had established his own reputation and credibility in the church. Even though people were proscribed from have medical doctors treat them, R’s opinions in the church were highly regarded, particularly in the ministry. He was regularly asked for his advice, which turned out to be nothing more than opinions, and bad ones at that. He took one look at our daughter’s birth mark and declared that it was cancer and that she would die from it. Our pediatrician told it was a mere birthmark and would disappear. It did. Our daughter is still alive after 30 years. Pediatrician 1; psychopath 0.

The con man and his wife J had children. The divorce was inevitable. Now the wife had no place to live with her children, so a self made millionaire in the church provided her and her children a place in his guest quarters. Now the millionaire was quite prosperous. He has his own home theatre. His son’s bedroom is larger than most people’s living rooms. They are well-to-do. Now they were good friends with the minister. Their son married the minister’s daughter and their daughter married the ministers son. The grandchildren are double cousins. The wedding for the millionaire’s son to the minister’s daughter cost $25,000. It was an impressive event to attend. Of course, the millionaire lets everyone know that he is a millionaire because of God’s blessings from his obedience to God. The minister has been very happy to have a very rich relative by marriage. This particular minister has always been telling people from the pulpit how worried he is about his retirement and that he doesn’t have enough money to retire. It is the case, though, that the minister will probably be OK, since he is now the President of United.

It was an accident in the apartment the millionaire provided for the woman who had been married to the psychopath. Something went wrong with a space heater. The fire destroyed the small apartment in the millionaire’s property where she took refuge. This had implications. The millionaire blamed her for destroying his property. He made the minister fully aware of his displeasure. The poor woman went on the minister’s bad list — and he ended up supporting a psychopath rather than helping a genuine church member in need.

There came a day in the divorce proceedings that the question of who would get the children came up in court. The church had an attorney assigned to the woman and paid for the legal fees — up until the day before court, that is. When the day approached, the woman called Pasadena to find out what happened to the lawyer and the church paying the legal fees for the custody of her children. Victor Kubic let her know that she lost the church’s support. She had no legal representation because the church stepped away. As a result, she lost her children and her erstwhile psychopath husband won a major battle.

Once on a minister’s bad list, always on the minister’s bad list. These people have a long memory for vengeance and they play the long game. This same poor woman went about doing good in her church. She helped a man who had a mental disorder. Because she was nice to him, he fixated on her and began stalking her. He continued stalking her after she was remarried for seven years. The couple being stalked begged and pleaded with the ministry which had passed from the Radio Church of God to the Worldwide Church of God to the United Church of God an International Association. The minister staunchly supported the stalker. You can guess why. The couple went to the Council of Elders. No dice. The minister in question is well connected. In fact, during his sermon on Pentecost, he made the comment that he had a talent for putting people in touch with the right contacts. He knows that because I told him that when I gave him my book, Assertive Incompetence — an Introduction to Management Malpractice. At least you can’t say he hasn’t learned anything from me. But I was hoping he would see himself in the book and make changes, like that would ever happen.

You know the rest. God intervenes. Or at least sensible judges in civil court do. The restraining order and all. I’m not certain who really won in this particular part of the war. To make the point: The war with that particular family is not over by a long shot.

The thing is, we might not know who the ministers are, but we certainly have a view of what they are. The Apostle Paul commented that we are not ignorant of Satan’s devices. I think he was wrong about that one thing. We don’t know Satan’s devices, although, I must say, they look a lot like the practices of the Modern Church Corporate. We do know a lot of things, such as what happened to the son of the minister, leaving his wife and going to San Francisco and all with his roommate. I wonder if the guys ever married.

The base problem is what it has always been: After the dust settles, it is clear that those with their lies, delusions and deceptions are not at all what they represented themselves to be; and the truth finally comes out. The only problem that’s left is to find a way to put a spin on it for plausible deniability. And that’s damned inconvenient.

We have had accounts of how crimes are covered up in the Armstrongist community for years now. It isn’t sin, it’s crime. It isn’t like someone works on the Sabbath once a year or skips paying a tithe or something. We are talking about crimes for which the perpetrators should have gone to prison. GTA date raping Ambassador Coeds. The various men committing incest with their daughters. When our daughter was 12, she told us that her best friend in church was being raped by her father. The church did nothing about it but cover it up. It sort of turned out and justice was done: He was working on the toilet holding tank on a ship and it broke open and the contents washed over his face and head. He died shortly after that. In church, a certain elder was known for molesting boys. The leading women (ones who had no position) in the church went all the way to Pasadena and had no response, so they “watched” the man, particularly on holy days. Ironically, I did not know it at the time, but the man was the Sabbath school teacher for my own son. Universally, the Armstrongist churches have followed the corporate policies of covering up crime, not fixing it.

United is interestingly different. As a church corporate, the other state incorporated Armstrongist churches could learn a great deal from them. They are progressive, and while they adopt the worst of the corporate model and implement it badly [and I'm the one that gave them the corporate stuff from Weyerhaeuser, which they adopted], they are brilliantly, devilishly clever about it. They learn from reading forums like this to use ever new methodologies to cover up crimes committed by their ministers and members. What they do is NOT solve the problem. What they DO is to bribe the victim! Remember the stalker? They seduced the couple being stalked by giving them a bribe. It sort of solves the problem without solving the problem, but it makes it much more palatable for the victims to continue to bask in the warmth of the church corporate cesspool without retarding the laps the ministry and administration are doing in it.

It would be nice if we never hear another incident of a 70 old elder fondling a sixteen year old girl in front of people of the congregation, for example. They are perfectly comfortable to remain secure in their church corporate. I would remind everyone that a corporation is an “It” — a thing. It has no empathy. It is amoral. It exists for no particularly good reason except to exist. It does everything it can as a non person to continue its existence. The end justifies the means. If it takes murder, rape, incest, theft, lies, deceptions, so be it. If you are doing a good work, doing evil to keep it going is a must. The only rule is, DON’T GET CAUGHT at it.

Scripture speaks of the leopard, how it can it cannot change its spots. The Armstrongists don’t seem to be able to change, but it isn’t mere spots. It’s more like stripes — and not the stripes by which we are healed, either. It’s like stripes on a skunk.

If we consider that the Armstrongist community is the ultimate in church corporate, it follows that they are not for us. Anyone who is not for us is against us. Anyone who is against us is our enemy.

While the leaders of the Armstrongist community may be our enemies, to each other, they are more than enemies: They are competitors. Any Armstrongist champions out there looking for some sort of confederation of the various clan sects of the different flavors of Armstrongism can just forget it. If they have made the lower than dirt peasants of their fiefdoms their enemies from the start, it is certain that they will never give up their own power and freedom to their competitors. Any fantasies to the contrary should be treated by a competent mental health professional.

It is important to know that if you don’t have money and you aren’t well connected and don’t have any power, and if you are a truth seeker, the Armstrongist churches of God will declare war on you and your children for generations to come, for as long as the Armstrongist community lasts.

One wonders what they expect to win.